A fun and freewheeling look at the many events big and small, famed and forgotten from a single calendar year
Episodes
Monday Feb 28, 2022
Monday Feb 28, 2022
In the second-to-last episode of this It Happened One Year season, Sarah & Joe take a look back at the rest of the celebrities we lost way back in the landmark year of 1994. The major figures of politics, literature, sports, film & television, crime, music, and more are given that classic IHOY send off. Hey, what takes place on an awards show before they reach their grand finale? Gotta give a nod to the dear departed! Richard Nixon, Jackie Kennedy, Kurt Cobain, Burt Lancaster, Wilma Rudolph, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Jack Kirby, Harry Nilsson, Peter Cushing, Raul Julia, Jersey Joe Walcott, Henry Mancini, Jessica Tandy, and many more feature prominently in this super-sized episode!
Monday Feb 21, 2022
Monday Feb 21, 2022
It Happened One Year's landmark fiftieth episode delves into one of the show's little-covered corners of 1994 entertainment - video games, specifically the blockbuster titles from the Super Nintendo, with cameos by the Sega Genesis, and a few long forgotten products from both. Sarah & Joe cover their respective paths of console enjoyment in the early '90s, touching on the top selling games of the year - including Donkey Kong Country and Super Metroid - and the wildly creative by necessity Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. Along the way, various PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Game Cube, and Wii discussions pop up, with cameos from Mario Kart, Rockstar titles, Simpsons Road Rage, Final Fantasy, Triple Play '97, Super Punch-Out!!, and more!
Monday Feb 14, 2022
Monday Feb 14, 2022
Love is in the air this Valentine's Day, and what is more romantic than the Jack Nicholson/Michelle Pfeiffer cult (?) classic monster melee Wolf?! It's another Dealer's Choice - the first one in a while - and the result brings us straight to the full moon doorstep of horror, suspense, lust, and highbrow literary society circa 1994! Sarah & Joe discuss werewolf films of the era (which this film only basically fits into), making difficult comparisons with An American Werewolf in London and that all-time show favorite Teen Wolf, why anyone involved actually made this movie, and the stunning pedigree of the cast & crew. Was this more a Mike Nichols project, or a Jack Nicholson one? Is "sniff acting" the hardest thing to ever pull off on film? Is James Spader the film's MVP? Along the way, attention is thrown to Lon Chaney, Tom Everett Scott, Carnal Knowledge, The Prince of Tides, Stan Freberg, The Witches of Eastwick, and many more!
Monday Feb 07, 2022
Monday Feb 07, 2022
It's time to take a look at the good, the lucrative, and the flops coming from the motion picture industry in 1994, in this cinematic forty-eighth episode! Sarah & Joe's lengthy trip around the film universe covers the biggest box office grossers, the proliferation of unsuccessful sequels & remakes versus the gangbusters industry of today, the Oscar winners and nominees, and the movies they feel stand the test of time and are all-time classics. Dozens of films get a glance, from your Hoop Dreams, Pulp Fiction, and Ed Wood to your Exit to Eden, A Million to Juan, and Cops and Robbersons! Cult faves such as The Crow, Clerks, and Leon: The Professional arise in the same breath as Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow and Nell, as the hosts yet again try to answer the classic It Happened One Year question - why didn't Speed get nominated for Best Picture, and would it have were there ten slots for nominees in '94?
Monday Jan 31, 2022
Monday Jan 31, 2022
Two of the absolute icons of 1994 are featured in this legendary forty-seventh episode of It Happened One Year! Tonya Harding's ex-husband Jeff Gillooly and Nicole Simpson's ex-house guest Kato Kaelin had lives of varying success and public interest prior to the events of '94, but afterward they would become household names forever, and for very different reasons. The tribulations of the Gillooly/Harding union are explored, up to and including The Crime of the First Half of the Year, followed by as much as could be unearthed about Gillooly (now Jeff Stone) ever since. The exact circumstances that led Kato to be in O.J.'s guest house on that fateful night are also broken down, plus his acting and celebrity careers before and after. Along the way, Sarah & Joe throw love to Gillooly's favorite Nevada diner, Kato's amazing Cameo performances, the on-field skills of the Milwaukee Brewers in recent years, Sarah's ever-evolving feelings toward Tonya, Kaelin co-stars Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galligan, Malcolm McDowell, Samuel L. Jackson, and Zack Galifianakis, and Gillooly's dynamite sense of humor.
Monday Jan 24, 2022
Monday Jan 24, 2022
This super-sized forty-sixth episode is legitimately way too much - everyone involved would agree. But in order to cover (briefly) the events of the plague on the sub-continent in 1994 and (more expansively) everything personally connected to the COVID pandemic of 2020, 2021, 2022, and so on requires a whole bundle of time! Sarah & Joe take us on a rollercoaster of emotion, swinging from discussions about all the breads and pastries made over the past two years to passionate worry about the end of American democracy as we know it. Many, many topics pop up along the way - the popular TV shows of the lockdown, the Insurrection of January 6th, video games played and quiz/learning websites obsessed over, opinions over the single most destructive person of our lifetime, new and old music discovered with year-end Spotify calculations, puzzles and board games, the villainous manipulations of the GOP, the formulation and continued creation of this show, and the karaoke app Smule, which produces possibly the single best moment in It Happened One Year history. Running the same amount of time as Eegah: The Name Written in Blood and Toy Story 2, this episode falls somewhere between the two as far as linear coherence and sparkling entertainment!
Monday Jan 17, 2022
Monday Jan 17, 2022
It's a special brand of sci-fi suspense this week, as this gelatinous forty-fifth episode tackles the eerie, inexplicable events in Oakville, Washington from August of 1994! Sarah & Joe attempt to concoct theories as to what caused pellets of goo to rain down in unholy terror on the unsuspecting residents of this small northwest town, causing some to fall ill and causing some Fidos and Meow-Meows to go off to that big PetSmart in the sky! Along the way, the hosts try to relate these bizarre goings-on to vintage X-Files episodes, speculate whether something similar on a much larger scale is responsible for the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, and posit their educated guesses as to what really took place the day(s) the blobs crashed down to earth!
Monday Jan 10, 2022
Monday Jan 10, 2022
While an especially bad year for celebrity deaths, 1994 was particularly devastating on the field of comedy, taking a big group of super talented folks from us, and many at far too young an age. Sarah & Joe, in typical fashion befitting longtime death pool participants, focus on the positives, and try to celebrate the joy brought to us all from these major figures in the field. Batman TV actor Cesar Romero, stand-up legend Bill Hicks, beloved star John Candy, SNL trailblazer Danitra Vance, and National Lampoon/SNL writer/performer Michael O'Donoghue all get a piece of the spotlight in this week's forty-fourth side-splitting episode! The lengthy, goofball discussion covers topics such as whether Romero was the most committed or least committed actor on Batman, if Hicks is actually still alive and performing long-form political improv, if Candy's film career ever eclipsed the work he did on SCTV, whether Vance's season of SNL was the worst in the show's history, or if that was reserved for one of O'Donoghue's returns in '80s. Along the way, cameos abound from Shirley Temple, Denis Leary, the JFK Assassination, Phoebe Zeit-Geist, Edith Prickley, Robert Downey Jr., Doug Kenney, Fatty Arbuckle, and many more!
Monday Jan 03, 2022
Monday Jan 03, 2022
It may be a new year for the world, but it's still 1994 around these parts! Sarah & Joe take a quick look at the life and times of famed actor and pitchman Telly Savalas, who left behind quite the body of interesting work 28 years ago! Almost certainly best remembered for his massive hit detective show of the 1970's Kojak, Savalas' lengthy career before and after is explored, through discussions of his one-shot as James Bond nemesis Blofeld in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, landing the role of Pontius Pilate in The Greatest Story Every Told, and his status as a legendary bald sex symbol. Along the way, much time is given to his very brief appearance in The Muppet Movie, the who's who that attended his funeral, speculation about whether the Sesame Street character is named for him, who the hell the other Muppets are named after, the best joke from the British sitcom Only Fools and Horses, and how much Kevin Sorbo sucks. Brief, frenetic, and scattershot forty-third episode!
Monday Dec 20, 2021
Monday Dec 20, 2021
It is the eve of the Major League Baseball strike - August 11th, 1994 - and acting commissioner Bud Selig sits alone in his offices, as solitary as an oyster. With the work stoppage looming and the season in jeopardy, he is visited by the ghost of former commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, warning him that the only chance of averting this crisis comes in the form of three spirits, who hope to inform him about the past, present, and future of the state of baseball...
The biggest It Happened One Year episode yet transforms into radio comedy/drama with this fully scripted, full cast forty-second entry! With a generous assist from the long defunct Petri Wine Company of California, A Baseball Humbug vaults through time with a phantasmagoric adaptation of A Christmas Carol, done in that inimitable IHOY style. Celebrate the holidays and gather the family around the audio machine as in days of yore for this crazy intersection of history, sports, and full-throated acting in podcasting!